INFERNO FESTIVAL 2019: DAY 4

 

(In what has become an annual tradition, our man from the UK, Andy Synn, attended Inferno Festival on April 18 – 21, 2019, in Oslo. We have been posting his reports on the event this week, day by day, accompanied by a few of his photos, and this is the final installment.)

 

The fourth and final day of Inferno Festival this year was a tale of woe and suffering… for me anyway… which began the previous evening.

By the time I got back to my hotel after Taake the night before I was already spiralling pretty hard. I had a raging fever, my legs were barely holding me up, and every single part of me felt simultaneously frozen and on fire and covered in sandpaper. For the next fourteen hours (trust me, I counted them) I was unable to sleep, unable to rest, and unable to do anything but sweat and shiver and curse my own existence.

Thankfully I eventually managed to drop off, as otherwise I think I might honestly have gone insane, although by this point it was early Sunday afternoon, which made it extremely unlikely I was going to see all the bands I wanted to. But I did manage to see some.

 

 

Sadly I missed out on seeing Cult of Fire, who were one of the bands I was most looking forward to seeing the whole weekend (and whose set, from the pictures I’ve seen, looked like something really special), so I have to extend my apologies to the band for that.

In fact I was so wiped out that I barely made it to the venue in time to catch Dvne late that evening, and by the time I’d walked to the venue my legs were already starting to feel pretty rubbery.

The thing is, Dvne were one of the bands I had most been looking forward to the whole weekend – after all, Asheran was one of my favourite albums of 2017 – so there was no way I was going to miss this opportunity to see them live (or to discover that they’re possibly the only band with a drummer skinnier than ours).

It was a hell of a good show too, and one which fully justified my struggle to drag myself from my sick-bed, with a setlist which was made up of (unless my memory deceives me) basically the entirety of Asheran performed in chronological order.

And while the venue itself was a little less than entirely full, the audience was still more than healthy and more than appreciative of the band’s particular brand of cinematic, spaced-out Prog Metal, and I don’t doubt that the quintet left the stage with several more fans than when they started!

Upstairs in the main auditorium things were much, much busier however, as local boys 1349 did their best to bring the house down in an explosion of fire and satanic fury, kicking off a set largely built around the band’s post-Hellfire material, beginning with a howling “Godslayer” and an unexpectedly nasty “Maggot Fetus… Teeth Like Thorns”.

Oddly enough, however, the band seemed a little rusty, at least during the first half of the show, with the occasional scuffed note or less-than-tight transition seeming to indicate that perhaps the quartet weren’t entirely on the same wavelength this evening.

Still, they seemed to warm up as the set went on (as did the venue, as the band’s use of pyro was reasonably unrelenting), and even if the lack of a second guitar occasionally robbed their songs of some muscle, Frost’s ever-intense drum work made sure everything stayed as punchy and as punishing as possible.

If 1349’s devilish blade seemed a little rustier than usual however, MisÞyrming were possibly even sharper than ever, delivering a no-frills, all-killer-and-no-filler, display of Icelandic Black Metal at its absolute finest that put pretty much put ever other Black Metal band I saw that weekend to shame.

Honestly, there’s not really much more I can say about them than that. Their performance was everything I needed it to be, especially considering how utterly god-awful I was feeling at that moment in time, and I can’t find a single fault with what I saw or heard.

Of course, as you might guess, I was in no shape to sit through an Opeth set after this, so I dragged my plague-ridden carcass back to the hotel, where I managed to get about an hour’s sleep (seriously) before having to check out and head back to the airport!

Hopefully I’ll be back at Inferno Festival next year again, ideally without getting sick as a dog this time (and maybe, if I’m very lucky, with the rest of the band in tow), but until then… I hope you enjoyed all these daily round-ups and discovered some new bands to check out in the meantime.

In particular you should give the following artists a listen asap:

Au-Dessus

Caronte

Avast

Dvne